Verb, not noun: On writing, identity, and actually doing the work

You don’t become a writer by calling yourself one—you become one by writing

Someone once said: Verb > Noun.

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing—an actor, a writer—I am a person who does things—I write, I act—and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

— Stephen Fry

Instead of saying, "I am a writer," say, "I write." I love that. Because I truly believe that writing isn’t about being—it’s about doing.

And yet, we live in a world where people want the title more than the work, where the identity of being a writer is often more alluring than the act of actually writing.

I see it all the time—the romanticization, the aesthetic, the illusion that calling yourself a writer is enough. But it isn’t.

Writing is a verb, not a noun.

The 10,000 hours and the last 10 years

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in any field.

While this theory has been debated, the core idea remains: expertise isn’t innate—it’s built through consistent effort over time.

By that metric, I have been a writer for over a decade. Not because I called myself one, but because I wrote. Every single day.

If writing is a skill that takes 10,000 hours to master, then let’s do the math:

• Let’s assume I wrote, on average, 2 hours a day (a conservative estimate). Some days, it was a few frantic minutes of journaling or prose poetry on Tumblr; other days, it was full-day stretches of fiction or client work.

• 2 hours a day × 365 days × 10 years = 7,300 hours.

• Factor in the days when I wrote all day (during deadlines, NaPoWriMo, deep dives into fiction), and let’s push that up to 9,000 hours conservatively.

Almost there. Almost mastery.

But the truth is—even when I do hit 10,000 hours, I know that won’t be enough. Writing isn’t something you master and then move on from.

I feel like I need 10,000 × 10 cycles to even begin to scratch the surface of what it means to truly write well.

Mastery in creative work feels like a moving target, and the deeper I go, the further away it seems. And on most days it excites me, on some days, it does exhaust me. But the excitement always wins.

A decade of NaPoWriMo: Writing whether or not inspiration strikes

This year will mark my 10th year doing NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). Every April, poets across the world challenge themselves to write a poem a day for 30 days.

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I started when I was a teenager, and I haven’t missed a year since. Not because I always had beautiful poems effortlessly dropping out my ass. But because I wanted to write, because I had made a commitment—to the craft, to myself.

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Some years, I wrote poems I was proud of. Other years, I wrote absolute garbage just to get the words out. But I wrote. And that’s what counts.

(Funny thing to note is that a lot of the times what I thought was garbage people seemed to love. And the poems I thought were brilliant, people were unimpressed with or didn’t even engage)

Professional vs passion: Writing is writing

I’ve also been a professional writer for years—a professional is someone who gets paid to write.

My job has been content marketing, fintech blogs, and financial storytelling, not creative fiction, but the act remains the same.

Writing under deadlines, under constraints, under expectations. Writing when the muse is dead and the brain is fried. Writing because the words must come out, not because it’s fun, not because it’s romantic, but because it has to get done.

Personally, I value creative writing a lot more than this. But I respect my professional writing a lot because it earns me a living right now when I am not able to do that from my poetry and my stories.

It’s an honest corporate living that I don’t hate because it’s just creative enough for me to show up to daily.

The problem with wanting the noun more than the verb

There’s a growing obsession with the idea of being a writer rather than actually writing.

People want the aesthetic—the tortured artist persona, the leather-bound notebooks, the Instagram bio that says Writer. But they don’t want the work.

They want the identity without the hours.
The noun without the verb.

Here’s the thing: Writing is unglamorous.

Writing is lonely.
Writing is often frustrating.
Writing is also a thankless activity.

Writing is typing 2,000 words in a story in a manic burst only to realize you don’t want to keep anything but a sentence from it. It’s reading poems you wrote back in college and cringing.

It’s not wanting to share your work with anyone or even wanting to read it again yourself. It’s finally sharing your work and years going by before anyone finally reads a word.

I really want people to understand that:

Writing is not thinking about writing. It’s not talking about writing. It’s not planning to write when the time is right.

It’s sitting down and putting words on the page or the Word doc again and again. It’s connecting with your soul, it’s communicating with your past and present selves.

Writing is processing grief, it’s expressing anger, it’s capturing life—the warmth of holding a hand, the heaviness of leaving a heart you still love, the moon that never abandons you, the child falling on the playground—it’s creating life, art.

What makes someone a writer?

People often ask me:
What makes someone a writer?

And my answer is always underwhelming. It’s neither poetic nor profound, as I know most expect.

Anyone who writes regularly, like it’s something they must do, like it’s something they want to do, like they can’t live without doing it.

That’s it.

Not publishing deals, not validation, not social media engagement.
Just the doing.

Writing because you have to.
Because you want to.
Because you can’t not.

But this isn’t about gatekeeping

I want to make one thing clear: This isn’t about keeping people out.

In fact, I’ve spent years encouraging people—friends, family, even strangers—who hesitated to call themselves writers. I’ve told them, If you write, you’re a writer.

I’ve validated people who felt the title was too big, too distant, too unattainable. I’ve reminded them that writing isn’t about being published or being known—it’s about the act itself.

So this isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about honesty. It’s about making sure people understand that writing is a process, not a personality.

And that if you want to be a writer, the answer is simple: Write.

The romanticization of writing does you a disservice

It’s easy to romanticize writing.

To fall for the memes, the jokes about writer’s block, the idea that talking about writing is just as valuable as actually writing.

But that’s a lie.

Romanticizing writing without actually writing is doing yourself a disservice. It turns writing into an identity rather than a practice. It makes it about the image instead of the craft.

And the truth is, the people who are actually writing don’t spend much time talking about how hard it is—they just do it (I do see the irony here, with this post but it’s an exception—a break taken between a poem).

What writing means to me

For me, writing isn’t just a skill. It’s not even just a career. It’s the way I inhale and exhale life—not in breaths, but in words. It’s how I process my existence, how I bridge the gap between my internal world and the external world, how I exist.

It is almost spiritual, like a prayer.

And that’s why it bothers me when people try to mooch off the identity of being a writer without actually writing.

Because to me, this isn’t just a title—it’s a way of living.

So, are you a writer?

Forget the title. Forget the aesthetic. Forget the dream of a book deal. Just ask yourself:

• Do you write even when no one is watching?

• Do you write because something in you needs to?

• Does writing feel cathartic?

• Have you written more words than you have spoken about being a writer?

If the answer is yes, you don’t need the noun. You already have the verb. Congratulations, you are a writer you write!